Some evidence in the JonBenet Ramsey
murder points toward her parents, and other evidence seems to clear them. If
the whole truth could be discerned, it would explain every piece of evidence,
because real events produced every bit of the crime scene. Sometimes, a single
key opens many doors, and one piece pulls the puzzle together. JonBenet’s
murderer inadvertently put the key piece of evidence into the ransom note.

On Christmas night
1996, at 755 15th Street, in the Boulder Colorado mansion of her parents, John
and Patricia Ramsey, JonBenet was murdered. Death resulted from both a severe
blow to the head that fractured her skull across the length of her head, and by
strangulation with a cord tightened with a broken stick around her neck. The
six-year-old girl had also been vaginally assaulted prior to her death.
Consider the following observations:

· Patsy
Ramsey called 911 at 5:52 a.m. on Dec. 26 telling police that her
daughter was missing and that she had found a ransom note.

· At
5:55 a.m. neighbors Fleet and Priscilla White are called to the Ramsey home,
along with other friends.

· Ransom
note excerpts: “Mr. Ramsey, Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals
that represent (sic) a small foreign faction. We respect your business (sic)
but not the country that it serves. At this time we have your daughter
in our possession (sic). She is safe and unharmed and if you want her to see
1997, you… will withdraw $118,000… I will call you between 8 and 10 am
tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting so I
advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we
might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence an
earlier pickup of your daughter. Any deviation of my instructions will result
in the immediate execution of your daughter. … You can try to deceive us, but
be warned we are familiar with Law enforcement countermeasures… Don't try to
grow a brain John. … Don't underestimate us John. Use that good, southern
common sense of yours. It's up to you now John! Victory! S.B.T.C.”

· The
note’s time element indicates it was composed around midnight. “At this time
we have your daughter… I will call you [by] 10 am tomorrow…”

· Consider
the phrase, “I advise you to be rested.” A kidnapper would not normally
give such advice to his victims. And no one urges sleeping people to get rest.

· The
ransom note refers to JonBenet 14 times but never by name. The note states,
“if you want her to see 1997”avoiding the personal “If you ever want to see
JonBenet again,” or “see her alive”.

· The
letter, abnormally long for a ransom note, demands a relatively small ransom,
exactly equal to Mr. Ramsey’s annual bonus.

· Detectives
found an entire draft of the ransom note in the home, and the legal pad on
which the final ransom had been written, along with Ramsey handwriting samples
similar to the style on the note.

· A
broken window had an obviously disturbed sill, under which police found a
scuffmark and below that a piece of broken glass on the basement floor.
However, police find no footprints outside the window. It had snowed that
night, just hours before the murder.

· There
were no signs of forced entry. The alarm system had not been activated. Four
people were known to be in the house that night, JonBenet, her nine-year-old
brother Burke, and their parents.

· The
Boulder police have no evidence pointing to Burke and have never considered
him a suspect.

· Detective
Linda Arndt, the only police officer on the scene in the hours prior to the
discovery of the body at 1:05 p.m., remembers Mr. Ramsey’s demeanor when
he initially greeted her as not distraught nor even upset, but cordial.

· Arndt
says that the Ramseys did not spend those morning hours in each other’s
company, but that Patsy stayed in the sunroom with friends and John stayed
mostly in his den, and read his mail in the kitchen.

· When
asked that morning who might be responsible for the crime, John gave police the
name of an employee; and Patsy gave the name of one of her housekeepers.

· Arndt
says that 10 a.m., the ransom note deadline, passed unnoticed. She says
that the Ramseys did not remark whatsoever regarding the fact that the
kidnapper had not called.

· Arndt
says that she asked the Ramseys and their friends to examine the ransom note
for clues, and that almost everyone offered ideas to her except Mr. Ramsey.

· Linda
Arndt says that she was confused about why the Ramseys would not speak to her.
They later refused a formal interview, and refused to take polygraph tests.

· Arndt
suggested Mr. Ramsey search the home. When he and Fleet White came upon the
corpse in the basement, Ramsey ripped the duct tape from her mouth and picked
up the 47 inch long, 45 pound body.

· The
circuitous route to wine cellar where the body was found would be very
difficult to navigate by a stranger, especially at night, especially with a
struggling child, especially when the staircase light switch is not in an
expected location on a wall, but above and behind someone entering the stairs.

· Arndt
saw Mr. Ramsey carrying the body from the basement, JonBenet’s unsupported arms
extended above her head, and realized that rigor mortis had set in, and that
she had been dead for some time.

· Such
rigor mortis sets in after about six to twelve hours. There was also the scent
of decomposition.

· At
1:30 p.m. a detective overheard John Ramsey talking by phone to his pilot
and arranging a trip to Atlanta that evening for himself, his wife and son.
Det. Sgt. Larry Mason told him, “You can’t leave.”

· The
coroner, Dr. John Meyer, found evidence of sexual assault from the previous
night: a small abrasion and small amounts of blood in both her underwear and
vagina. Three medical experts consulting for the police say that the injuries
were also consistent with prior sexual abuse. A black light helped reveal that
her body had been wiped clean but that a residue of blood was left on her
thighs.

· John
Ramsey says that he had carried a sleeping JonBenet from the car straight to
her bed that night. The coroner found something in her stomach “which may
represent fragment of pineapple.” The party she attended that night had served
no pineapple, but police found a bowl of pineapple on the Ramsey’s dinning room
table.

· The
murderer draped one of JonBenet’s blankets around her body. That blanket held
a pubic hair not linked to any family member. Unidentifiable DNA material was
beneath her fingernails. An unidentifiable palm print of unknown age was on
the wine cellar door. The panties on her body were too large for JonBenet and
contained a stain that DNA could not link to any house member.

· Upon
viewing the body, Patsy exclaimed that she had never before seen the underwear
on her daughter’s corpse. Detectives later found out that Patsy had recently
purchased that pair of underwear at Bloomingdales in New York for her
12-year-old niece, but that JonBenet begged to have it kept for her, so Patsy
kept it for her. Prior to the murder, even friends of the family knew of this
underwear story. If Patsy did recognize the distinctive underwear, and was
lying, then she was trying to point the police to the exculpatory evidence,
which she knew had been planted.

· Officer
Barry Harkopp interviewed next door neighbors and reported that Scott Gibbons
saw strange lights and movements coming from the kitchen area around midnight;
and neighbor Melody Stanton awoke her husband around midnight after hearing a
scream, and he stated he heard “the sound of metal clashing against cement.”
The Ramseys say they heard none of this.

· Police
found a Ramsey family flashlight on the kitchen counter, which was not normally
kept on that counter, but nearby.

· On
Dec. 27, 1996 Patsy Ramsey, being exhausted and lying down, reached up and
touched the face of a friend, Pam Griffin, the woman who had made JonBenet’s
pageant costumes. Griffin thought Patsy was delirious when she asked,
“Couldn’t you fix this for me?” as though a sewing machine could bring back her
daughter. She then remembers Patsy saying, “We didn’t mean for this to happen”
and Griffin got the definite feeling that in her weakened condition, Patsy had
revealed that she knew who the killer was.

· Regarding
the ransom note, on March 5, 1997, police and handwriting experts clear John
Ramsey and Burke as writers. The investigators believe Patsy probably wrote
the note and on April 14, 1997, they request from her a fifth handwriting
sample.

· The
Ramseys have often resisted cooperating with the ongoing investigation, as for
example, on Feb. 19, 1997 when they refused to allow police to interview
John’s oldest son, John Andrew. A known feud developed early on between the
detectives and District Attorney Alex Hunter’s office. Accusations of conflict
of interest suggested the reason for Hunter’s frequent conflict with detectives
and sheltering of the Ramseys. On Jan. 16, 1998, the Ramseys refuse a
police request for a second interview, but on June 25, 1998, allowed
Hunter’s office to question them.

· Linda
Wilcox, a housekeeper, described the Ramseys, upon finding a flood in their
home, Patsy panicking, and John as controlled but “furious,” so filled with
“rage” that his eyes “almost changed color.”

· The
duct tape roll and any remainder of the cord used were never found in the
Ramsey mansion. A footprint one foot from the body made in concrete dust from
a High-Tec brand boot could not be linked to any shoe in the house. The 4.5
inch stick used in the ligature strangulation came from one of Mrs. Ramsey’s
paintbrushes found among her art supplies in the basement.

· Four
fibers on the duct tape have been linked to the red and black jacket that Patsy
wore the night before. When Patsy greeted officers at 6 a.m. she was
wearing the same jacket she had just worn to the Christmas party. Patsy
maintains that she dressed that morning prior to finding out that JonBenet was
missing.

· Prosecutors
often fail to convict parents who murder a child, because most people cannot
even imagine committing such a crime. Sadly, however, Susan Smith drowned her
two young boys, just as thousands of parents have murdered their own children,
and countless fathers have molested their daughters. Such brutality does
happen, and society’s mindset disregarding such behavior results in more
victims.

· As
a six-year-old beauty queen, JonBenet was publicly sexualized by her parents,
dressed provocatively, and coached to saunter like a seductress.

· If
the Ramseys murdered their daughter, possible motives include: parents blaming
their daughter for their own sexual abuse of her; jealousy of mother toward
daughter; sexual incident getting further out of hand than planned; outburst of
wrath after sexual assault unintentionally breaks child’s skull. The actual
murder and kidnap scheme came about to cover up the initial crimes.

Much of the ransom note is
inconceivable from the perspective of an intruder, such as the compliment of
“respect” paid to the Ramsey business. But the clue that breaks the case is
the phrase, “I advise you to be rested.” No theory of an intruder can explain
that phrase, nor much of the above evidence against the Ramseys. However, that
key phrase explains the evidence, both the damning and the exculpatory. And it
shouts that the parents murdered their daughter and then worked to throw the
police off the trail.

On that Christmas
night, after Patsy put her son to bed, John began to sexually abuse his
daughter. One form of destructive behavior led to another and at midnight, in
a burst of anger and emotion, Patsy struck her daughter in the head, cracking
her skull. They realized the severity of the wound, and that JonBenet was near
dead. Neither wanted to be caught, so they began to conceal their crimes.
First, they strangle her, which both gets rid of her, and makes what would have
been an accidental death appear to be deliberate. Then they planned to dispose
of any damning evidence, but realized that, without evidence pointing to
someone else, they would be the only suspects. So, if they were to survive,
the resourceful Ramseys would have to rework the crime scene to point to an
intruder.

They decided to
write a ransom note, which John began dictating to Patsy. As they wrote the
note, they made mental notes about what evidence they must dispose of, and what
evidence they could gather and plant to divert attention. Their note had to
take into account that: it might take them hours to rework the crime scene; the
neighbors may have already noticed the commotion and might watch the house or
even call 911; John needed to leave the house to dispose of the roll of duct
tape, the spool of cord, etc.; neighbors may notice them stirring in the house
or might see John driving away or returning way past midnight.

Even though they
risked being seen, they were not ready to dump their best alibi. They needed
to tell the police that they were asleep all night, and heard nothing. Their
desperation to avert justice demanded that they try that alibi. Thus, they
planned to “wake up” at 6 a.m. and call police. However, a neighbor or
even a police patrol might have seen John Ramsey up at 3 a.m. Their
wording in the note guarded against that risk. If that worst-case scenario
occurred, Patsy could then admit: “Yes, we found the note last night. We were
afraid to call the police because of the death threat. John rushed out in
desperation to find JonBenet, and I searched the house. Then when John
returned without her, we reread the note, and realized that we had better go to
bed to get the rest we needed for the next day. When we woke up, we realized
that we needed help, so we decided to called 911. But we thought it better not
to mention that we had been up desperately looking for her last night.”

With that pretext,
they went to work. John found a pair of unused shoes, and made a footprint
next to the body. He then took those shoes, the oversized underpants, and
other damning evidence with him as he left the house around 1:30 a.m. He
went out of find a public restroom, at a nightclub, a gas station, a diner, or
even at a striptease joint or, preferably, an adult bookstore with video
stalls. Somewhere along his journey he dropped the damning evidence in the
trash. At the restroom, he used the panties that Patsy had recently purchased
to pick up a pubic hair, and then rubbed a stain onto the underpants.
Meanwhile Patsy decided to rewrite the ransom note, and she authored the final,
personal, contradictory lines, “Don't try to grow a brain John. … Use that
good, southern common sense of yours. It's up to you now John!” Patsy then
saw the broken ends of the paintbrush that John had overlooked and she hid them
among her art supplies. Later, Mr. Ramsey returned to the house, planted the
lone pubic hair on the blanket, put the stained underwear on the body, and
broke the basement window and disturbed the sill (which he later pointed out to
Fleet White).

The unidentifiable
DNA material under the fingernails was likewise collected by John, or by a few
days of normal child’s play. That material did not come from an intruder,
which would have suggested that JonBenet fought and struggled, getting the
attention of her neighbors, but not her parents. To help explain to the police
how they could have slept through the attack, Patsy Ramsey had taped their
daughter’s mouth shut.

Some may think this
plan too involved for the Ramseys to pull off. However, John had built a
successful defense contracting business, and Patsy had long ago managed to
become Miss West Virginia. Further, they had help. Book author and FBI
criminal profiler John Douglas wrote Mind Hunter, which reads in part
like the JonBenet case in the use of duct tape, ligatures, and similar phrases
in its ransom note. Investigators found that hardback in the Ramsey’s bedroom.

After rechecking the
crime scene, the Ramseys went to bed to rehearse their story. Neither slept
that night, neglecting their own advice.

View our DVDs titled God and the Death Penalty
and Focus on
the Strategy (it's
dynamic)
regarding Christian Political Strategy!
And listen to DenverBibleChurch.org pastor Bob Enyart's
news talk show
on the web at KGOV.com, and call Bob’s show
weekdays at 1‑800‑8Enyart at 5:00 p.m. E.T., and read about the ShadowGov.com protest at the
opening of the Clinton Library, and remember
that ShadowGov.com purchased at auction and then
burned OJ
Simpson's jerseys and Hall of Fame memorabilia.